I probably shouldn’t bother, but I love to hate on American Libraries, the trade magazine of the American Library Association. In August’s issue, I particularly enjoyed tearing into Adam Bennington’s “Dissecting the Web through Wikipedia,” in which the author entreats teaching librarians to have students analyze encyclopedia entries for bias in order to teach information literacy and why traditional library sources “might be more reliable.”
A few months ago, Nicholas Carr’s provocative Atlantic Monthly article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? posited that reading online changes the way we think, and that “read[ing] deeply” is inherently difficult on the web.
Carr cites a study showing that skimming text keeps us from absorbing it, but what I think his problem actually is that he hasn’t been taught to read online media at all. When he tries to read it the way he reads print, uninterrupted, deeply, he fails. I blame Adam Bennington.
I’ve (unfortunately) thought deeply about both of these articles, and perhaps Carr would say it is because I read them both in print, or Bennington might say I was skeptical about his piece because of its lack of citations, but I have concluded that they are both crap.
Bennington asks librarians to force students to read Wikipedia entries, figure out who the authors are, verify all the citations (sometimes hundreds!), think of sources about the topic that have been omitted, and as a “final step”, sit around and critique them with their peers.
Wikipedia defines its users as the group of people who write and edit Wikipedia. This is elitist, but the idea that reading alone is not enough echoes Paulo Freire’s notion of critical consciousness: “authentic reflection cannot exist apart from action”.
Surely, the “final step” after reading a Wikipedia entry and holding it to academic standards in an assignment that would have made me quit library school, is to edit the Wikipedia article in question. Adjust the bias, add some facts, clean up the grammar, make the narrative better, or otherwise participate in the project; or else, even if students learn something other than that librarians really are wound too tight, they aren’t being taught to do anything about it.
I think that if Adam Bennington’s students and Nicholas Carr would start editing Wikipedia, and otherwise engage online media critically, they might get a lot more intellectual satisfaction out of online texts, and they just might be empowered to change the world.
oh. my. god. i’ve been trying to articulate my feelings about these articles and, now, i don’t have to. because you just did it. dang. dang. <rare moment of speechlessness>
I just want to beat a dead journalistic horse: Nicholas Carr’s major source of “proof” that people don’t read online (and, even worse, that reading online fries their brains so that they can no longer read books, not even John Grisham) is, basically, himself and a few fuddy-duddy friends. And the Atlantic put this on their cover. How’s that for hype over honest reporting?
carr is also citing ‘information behavior of the researcher of the future’, http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf, which i realize is only medium-long (35 pages with lots of pictures) and i should probably read it.
unless someone else already read it and says it’s crap? the fact that the file is called ‘googlegen’ has me worried.
Caleb - this post makes me so happy I can’t even come up with an appropriate metaphor.
I’ve read the researcher of the future piece. It’s not crap, at least I don’t think it is. I remember being frustrated b/c the format (and really, the research method) made it hard for me to get a sense sometimes of what kind of evidence they were hanging some of their claims on.
I was mostly reading it looking for reasons to reject “omg the teens are like a whole other species than the rest of us” claims — and I thought it was very tempered on that front. The section about whether the “google generation” is a myth or reality generally concludes myth.
As to reading - it doesn’t actually talk about this much. Its focus is more on evaluation and searching behavior. It does conclude that most people exhibit “shallow, horizontal, ‘flicking’ behaviour in digital libraries. Power browsing and viewing appear to be the norm for all. The popularity of abstracts among older reseachers rather gives the game away. Society is dumbing down.”
Honestly, the first time I read this I thought that last sentence (which I assume is the one cited by Carr) sounded tacked-on and unsupported by the rest of the text. As you say, this may be “reading” behavior online but I don’t get why we then conclude that that’s the end of reading-during-research. Given that we come in contact with a much broader variety of sources with online searching it makes sense that we would scan the abstracts and reject a greater number of articles than we would if we were browsing horizontally through a more specific part of the literature.
There was an essay on reading in the New Yorker at the beginning of this year that I really loved because it illustrated how our idea of solitary, focused reading is itself historically and culturally situated. I think the author, Caleb Crain, said something like “the amazing thing isn’t that we’re reading less, it’s that we read at all.” That kind of perspective is missing from so much of this end-of-days rhetoric passing as analysis when it comes to the impact of the web.
I remember the Caleb Crain essay, but I don’t remember what I thought of it. If it was the one that talks about books being artifacts of our recent culture and not intrinsic to earthly human existence, then I liked it.
At the 2007 ALA Annual Conference RUSA President’s program, Allen Renear (”Professor of Library and Information Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign”) spoke about how libraries would aid the research process in a future when it would be impossible or at least impractical to read all of the published research relevant to your own topic.
The whole program was great, except Lee Rainie had a whats-the-matter-with-kids-they-dont-care-about-privacy section in his talk.
The Deep Though I had then was that humans and machines were absorbing smaller and smaller bits of information. In the old canard reversed, wisdom is greater than knowledge is greater than information is greater than data. What’s smaller than data? References, I think, or pointers, to steal a bit from computer science, but what’s smaller than that?
I’m not researching anything, but what strikes me now is that I rely more on peers to filter and summarize information than I do libraries. I think a big difference between command-f and the 200+ feeds in my reader is that I trust you all a lot more than I trust most random library bloggers.
I am definitely hopeful that libraries matter in the future for all kinds of reasons, but if bibliographic research is not the center of anyone’s universe, I don’t think much will have changed.
I do kind of wonder what it means when citing bibliographic sources is the only way to get an edit into Wikipedia entries with anyone watching them.
I’ve read it. I’m not going to say it is crap, but some red flag got raised while I was reading it. Then I came across Jon Udell’s post detailing a peek into the research behind it:
http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/02/08/mythbusting-the-google-generation-report/
“The study making this claim was constructed and published in a way that resists all efforts to evaluate its relevance, accuracy, or authority. Which hardly matters, since none of the reporting about the study seems to have made any such effort.”
I have to admit that I hadn’t read Carr’s essay before, but inspired by reading your post, Caleb, I decided to finally do it. (How’s that for deep reading and making rich connections?) And not only did I read this essay on a screen, I read it (gasp!) on a mobile device. And strangely, I don’t feel that I’m any stupider than I did before I read it.
So first of all, I find it terribly ironic that Carr argues that we’re losing the ability to read lengthy works in a long essay. This is like Tom Wolfe saying that the novel is dead and then gaining more fame (and presumably money) from Bonfire of the Vanities than he ever did from his essays.
So the problem with this essay is, I think, that Carr proceeds from two completely incorrect premises.
First: “The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information.” No it is not. The Internet is a machine for the efficient transmission of info, but not automated. And I hardly need to point out to a bunch of librarians that collection and manipulation are value-adds layered on top of the collection. So to argue that the Internet causes the mindset of finding the perfect knowledge work algorithm is nonsense. Technology does not just *happen* with society as a passive bystander, it’s a social choice. Critiquing intellectual technologies and the scientific method is all well and good… but decrying its evils, well, that way, I suspect, lies fundamentalism. Not to mention that it’s disingenuous for someone who makes his living as a technology commentator.
Second: For all Carr’s pissing and moaning about Google and his love of deep reading, he conflates information retrieval and information use. Brin is right: “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Of course you would: if I can do my work faster when I have full-text access to some stuff than I can without, think how much faster I’d be with full access to everything, all the time. Could I get more work done? Probably, since I’d spend less time seeking and more time using. Carr objects to a lack of time spent on contemplation. But you need information to make contemplation possible, and making it laborious to access that information does nothing to aid contemplation.
Now, of course, I feel stupid that I’ve even spent this much time arguing with Carr, when fundamentally I don’t even think his argument is worth my time to engage with. So Caleb, I agree with you: crap.
Ah, how I love this post. I haven’t read the unfortunate Bennington article, but OMG rly? How does one come up with an assignment like the one you’re describing? How does one think that’s an appropriate way to read, analyze, and engage with a genre like a Wikipedia article? I’m just… I have no idea.